16
LUCAS TRIED TO SLEEP but was too wired; he watched CNN for a while, went out for a walk, trying to smooth himself out. Got a sandwich, walked back home. Read the murder file again, the latest information from the co-op center.
Called around: nothing moving but the news.
"We're starting to attract some serious attention now," Rose Marie said, in a late-afternoon call. "We'll make the networks tonight. We'll start getting some out-of-towners."
"That always helps," Lucas said.
He finally got to sleep at seven o'clock, only to wake up in the middle of the night, sweating, disoriented, worried about the sudden silence around him, and the beeping sound, like a truck backing up. His face hurt, but a dull pain: the worry came from something else.
Then boom/crackle/flash: a thunderstorm rolling in. What else? There was more. He sat up, glanced at the clock. No clock. He got out of bed, listened, flipped on the lights. No lights. He looked out the window, the hair rising on the back of his neck, the killer's phone call in his mind. The guy knew who he was…
No lights on the street. He got his pistol, padded out through the living room, moving confidently through the house in the dark. He'd designed the place; he knew every inch of it. In the kitchen, he looked out the back windows: no lights.
Power outage. The beeping sound continued. He went into the study, crawled under the desk, turned off the computer's battery backup system, and the beeping stopped. He flipped on the lights in the kitchen; nothing happened, but they would tell him when the power came back on. He moved into the living room, awake now, feeling the impulse from a spurt of adrenaline, dropped into a chair, the.45 in his lap.
Thought about it. He was still thinking about it, getting nowhere, when the lights came back twenty minutes later.
IN THE MORNING, before he shaved or showered, he called Del. The phone rang for a moment, then Del came up; he sounded as wired as Lucas had been.
"You up?" Lucas asked.
"I haven't been to bed yet. We got a line on West, but it's thin." Tires squealed and a horn honked in the background. "We're looking for a guy named Gary who begs for money at the McDonald's stoplight in Dinky Town," Del said. "Problem is, Gary is drunk somewhere and probably won't show up before his shift starts at eleven o'clock. He supposedly has been hanging out with West."
"Where does he work? Gary?"
A moment of silence. Then, "I just told you. At the McDonald's stoplight in Dinky Town. That's where I am now." In his mind's eye, Lucas could see exactly where Del was standing-a pay phone famous for dope deals.
"He has a shift?"
"It's a good spot. He works it from eleven to three. These two other guys have it from seven to eleven, and three to six or seven. They share the sign: HOMELESS IRAQ VETERAN, STRUGGLING WITH AIDS. The night guy might be West, but we're not sure."
"You don't know where this Gary guy sleeps?"
"One of the tunnels, I guess," Del said. "We're trying to figure that out now."
"Shrake and Jenkins still with you?"
"Yeah. Shrake had some leftover amps, and we're feeling pretty good," Del said.
"Shhh…"
Del said, "Well, we took you serious when you told us to take our saps."
"That's tight. I'm heading down to St.John's. You find this guy, call me."
SLOAN WAS RIGHT on time. They took the truck, headed south. Sloan wanted to talk about the security hospital, and rock 'n' roll.
"If the Big Three trained somebody, they had to have access to him. We know that Charlie Pope had access," he said. "The question is, Who else had that kind of access? The training couldn't have been quick, it would have taken awhile."
Lucas wasn't sure about that. "Why would it take awhile? Assume that the guy is already nuts, and just needed to be pointed."
"Ah. But he's not just nuts, he's smart," Sloan said. "Smart people have their own ways of doing things, even if they're crazy. They really got to this guy. They remodeled his brain. They had to convert him."
"I'VE GOT A bad feeling that nobody'll really know about who-all had access," Lucas said. "The place is only halfway a prison-all kinds of people go in and out of the secure wing. Half the menial work in the hospital is done by inmates."
"But this guy-the killer guy is major nuts. How many people who were major nuts have been recently released, and had extensive access?"
"Other than Mike West."
"Ah, he's not major nuts," Sloan said. "He's just one of those poor-fuck schizophrenics who can't deal."
THEY RODE ALONG for a minute, and Lucas said, "We would have asked all these questions one day after the Rice killings, if we hadn't found Pope's DNA. Absolutely sidetracked us."
"No it didn't," Sloan said. "We would have had no idea about the hospital if it hadn't been for the DNA. He actually put us on track."
"Not if he was going to kill them like the Big Three wanted them killed," Lucas said. "Angela Larson might have been a coincidence, being killed like Taylor would kill her. But when Rice was killed like Biggie Lighter would have… cut off Rice's dick… we would have noticed. Somebody would have."
Sloan scratched an ear. "Huh. I didn't think of that."
"Because we were sidetracked," Lucas said. "The guy's been running us like a railroad."
FARTHER DOWN THE ROAD, Sloan said, "I got two words for you. About the rock 'n' roll list,"
"Rock n roll? That's three words."
"Two words: Lou Reed."
"Lou Reed… 'Walk on the Wild Side.'"
"It's not on your list. I heard it the other day when I was lyin' on my ass, and I thought, 'Jesus, that's gotta go on the list.'"
"You're right, but the list is too long," Lucas said. "I have to start cutting songs. I was thinking, maybe I should limit it to one song per group-but I can't figure out how to do that, either. I'd leave out some of tile best ones."
"You know what else you don't got?"
"What?"
"'Mustang Sally.'"
"Ah, shit."
"You've got a choice between Wilson Pickett and Buddy Guy," Sloan said..
"I can't make that choice."
"Life sucks and then you die.'
SLOAN HAD STARTED calling the security hospital the "bat cave" and as they were driving up the hill, the phrase kept going through Lucas's head. The place didn't look anything like a bat cave, but it felt that way-felt like a haunted English country house, except bigger.
"We don't tell them about Pope," Lucas said, as they got out of the truck.
"Of course not. We talk about the second man."
INSIDE, they were taken to the director's office; Lawrence Cale had been fishing the first time they visited, and they hadn't met him. He was a tall, slender, balding man, in his middle fifties, wearing too-large glasses that magnified his eyes. He reminded Lucas of the farmer in Grant Wood's American Gothic painting. He was chewing on a toothpick.
"My deputy says the last time you two were here, you, mmm, seriously disturbed some of the patients," he said, after pointing them into visitor chairs.
"That's right," Lucas nodded. "They were pretty much having screaming fits when we left."
"That's not funny," Cale said. "It can take days, weeks; sometimes, to calm them down."
"I see that as your problem," Lucas said. He was tired of this patient shit. "Those three guys are responsible for three ordinary nice people being tortured to death."
Sloan was digging in his briefcase, pulled out an eight-by-ten print, slipped it across the desk. "This used to be Carlita Peterson. She was a college professor. They haven't found the gut dump yet."
Cale took in the picture, flipped it over, and passed it back to Sloan without comment. "I had Chase, Lighter, and Taylor transferred to isolation. They don't see anybody but staff. No radio or television. Everything that is said to them is taped, and we review the tapes daily. They are allowed two books a day. They specify the genre, and we choose the books, so nobody can plant a message in a book. And we check the books before they go into the cells."